The ever-scrolling nature of today’s audiences calls for an overhaul of your creative production workflows. To maintain a competitive edge, you need to seamlessly develop and deliver personalised content across various platforms and formats. Creative Automation is the lesser-known solution to scaling content production, improving efficiency and saving money, all while enhancing your creative operations.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke
Driving creative transformation for efficient production
Through Creative Automation, you can leverage technology for scalable creative asset production, combining the power of dynamic templates and swappable elements such as Calls to Action, products and video scenes. Not only does Creative Automation save you time, money and resources, it also provides the opportunity for your organisation to stay future-proof and streamline your marketing and sales workflows.
Evaluating your creative production workflows
Improving your creative production workflow should be on the top of your list if you want to see results from your creative projects. According to this study by Finances Online, the top three reasons for implementing automation into the marketing efforts of companies are the following: streamlining marketing and sales workflows (35%), improving customer engagement and experience (34%) and minimising manual (repetitive) tasks (30%).
Cost and time savings as well as a faster time to market are obvious benefits, but how do you get there? The answer lies in taking a closer look at your creative production setup and identifying the areas that need improvement.
Problematic aspects include:
- Undefined and undocumented processes
- Overly complicated workflows
- Fragmented technologies
- Unautomated repetitive tasks
Addressing issues in creative production workflows
Processes not fully defined and documented
To maintain consistency despite the geographical distribution of your teams, ensure that your briefings and workflows are well-defined and documented.
Overly complicated workflows
Audit and streamline your processes by adopting workflow management platforms with features like media previews, multi-user access and tagging.
Fragmented technologies
Standardise the platforms, tools and communication methods across your teams to optimise the review process and prevent mismanagement.
Repetitive steps not automated
Automate repetitive tasks to achieve greater consistency and satisfaction in your workflows.
Benefits of Creative Automation
Traditionally, if an agency had a ā¬10,000 budget to shoot a video, they would probably shoot the video and produce around five to ten creative assets. In the event of poor performance, the client would have to repeat the entire process and pay another ā¬10,000 to try again.
Creative Automation saves you money in three ways:
- It eliminates the need for additional resources or staff.Ā Ā
- It allows for extensive testing and optimisation of creative assets.
- It reduces reliance on outsourcing to meet deadlines.
Moreover, Creative Automation leads to creative transformation. This enables you to invest in more valuable campaign activities, such as research, data analysis, strategic planning, brand reputation management and skill development.
Imagine this hypothetical situation:
Multiplying some potential variables for one brand’s campaign amounts here to a substantial 13,200 ad variations.
This is a lot to task your creative teams with.
Imagine you pay 50 euros per hour for a designer to make these variations, and each variation takes approximately an hour: your designer will need to bill you ā¬660,000 for these variations alone. But the biggest deal breaker is really the time this takes.
Considering each pixel-perfect variation would take at least an hour, in a 40-hour week a designer will only see the completion of 40 of these. To reach the actual target of 13,200 variations within a monthās deadline, around 80 designers would be needed on staff to succeed. This is not taking into account feedback loops, sicknesses or other unexpected delays.
Creative Automation: Not Just About Cost Reduction
While Creative Automation helps with cost reduction, it also paves the way for effective creative production workflows. It provides relief from manual, repetitive work, enabling marketers to stay human-centric while harnessing the benefits of automation.
When we think of automation, we might view it as a threat to the human parts of creative operations. However, automating some processes in your creative production workflows makes things more human and not the other way around.
Any successful campaign is thoroughly researched, crafted, approved and vision-executed by humans. These are the people that have the power to utilise Creative Automation as a tool for their storytelling, and to help their teams and companies become future proof.
Unlocking Creative Transformation
Adopt a template-driven approach in designing, production and adaptation of marketing materials. With Creative Automation, you can centralise production routines to foster collaboration and increase efficiency.
- Creative Automation can bring forth creative transformation while optimising creative production workflows.
- It can significantly save costs for a brand while maintaining operational strength.
- To achieve creative success, embrace human skills and insights in combination with automation.
Wrapping up
Feedback from our clients shows that there is a 54% reduction of time and a 62% reduction of cost after integrating our Creative Automation solution into their creative process.
Added to this, creative production workflows are strengthened not only because of the increase in speed granted in the automated versioning process, but also because a Creative Automation platform allows many creative production processes take place there. This includes building the templates, reviewing the variations and connecting to product feeds which will send out these pixel-perfect creative assets into the world.
Need more convincing? Reach out for a chat.
